Daily Manna · Day 290 · October 17
Mercy as High as Heaven
“For as the heaven is high above the earth, so great is his mercy toward them that fear him.”
You cannot get to the top of the sky.
The man who wrote this looked up and saw a dome. Waters above, lights fixed in it, a height that was enormous and, he assumed, finite. He measured God's mercy against it because it was the largest thing he could point at. We look up and see something worse for the comparison and better for the point: no ceiling at all, distances that stop meaning anything once you say them aloud, light still arriving from things that burned out before anyone wrote a psalm. His picture and ours are not the same picture and there is no sense pretending otherwise.
What survives the difference is the method. He is not saying God's mercy is very large. He is choosing the one measurement that cannot be walked to the end of, in his cosmos or in ours, and saying: like that. And the next verse does it again sideways. As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us. North and south have poles. East and west do not meet.
He attaches it to them that fear him, which is the part that is usually hurried past. It is not the fear that hides. It is the fear that takes him seriously enough to come out into the open, which is the only posture from which a person ever finds out how far the mercy goes.
Now stop. Do not turn this into a plan. Go outside if you can, look up for a minute, and say nothing at all.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 290 is Substance and Evidence (Hebrews 11:1).